JavaScript | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Operators of the GootLoader campaign are setting their sights on employees of accounting and law firms as part of a fresh onslaught of widespread cyberattacks to deploy malware on infected systems, an indication that the adversary is expanding its focus to other high-value targets. "GootLoader is a stealthy initial access malware, which after getting a foothold into the victim's computer system, infects the system with ransomware or other lethal malware," researchers from eSentire  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity services provider said it intercepted and dismantled intrusions aimed at three law firms and an accounting enterprise. The names of the victims were not disclosed. Malware can be delivered on targets' systems via many methods, including poisoned search results, fake updates, and trojanized applications downloaded from sites linking to pirated software. GootLoader resorts to the first technique. In March 2021,  details em

Threat actors leveraged a cloud video hosting service to carry out a supply chain attack on more than  100 real estate websites  operated by Sotheby's Realty that involved injecting malicious skimmers to steal sensitive personal information. "The attacker injected the skimmer JavaScript codes into video, so whenever others import the video, their websites get embedded with skimmer codes as well," Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 researchers  said  in a report published this week. The skimmer attacks, also called formjacking, relates to a type of cyber attack wherein bad actors insert malicious JavaScript code into the target website, most often to checkout or payment pages on shopping and e-commerce portals, to harvest valuable information such as credit card details entered by users. In the latest incarnation of the Magecart attacks, the operators behind the campaign breached the Brightcove account of Sotheby's and deployed malicious code into the player of the

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

Threat actors have been found using a previously undocumented JavaScript malware strain that functions as a loader to distribute an array of remote access Trojans (RATs) and information stealers. HP Threat Research dubbed the new, evasive loader "RATDispenser," with the malware responsible for deploying at least eight different malware families in 2021. Around 155 samples of this new malware have been discovered, spread across three different variants, hinting that it's under active development. "RATDispenser is used to gain an initial foothold on a system before launching secondary malware that establishes control over the compromised device," security researcher Patrick Schläpfer  said . "All the payloads were RATs, designed to steal information and give attackers control over victim devices." As with other attacks of this kind, the starting point of the infection is a phishing email containing a malicious attachment, which masquerades as a text

Malicious actors have yet again published two more typosquatted libraries to the official NPM repository that mimic a legitimate package from Roblox, the game company, with the goal of distributing stealing credentials, installing remote access trojans, and infecting the compromised systems with ransomware. The bogus packages — named " noblox.js-proxy " and " noblox.js-proxies " — were found to impersonate a library called " noblox.js ," a Roblox game API wrapper available on NPM and boasts of nearly 20,000 weekly downloads, with each of the poisoned libraries, downloaded a total of 281 and 106 times respectively. According to Sonatype researcher Juan Aguirre, who  discovered  the malicious NPM packages, the author of noblox.js-proxy first published a benign version that was later tampered with the obfuscated text, in reality, a Batch (.bat) script, in the post-installation JavaScript file. This Batch script, in turn, downloads malicious executables

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Friday  warned  of crypto-mining and password-stealing malware embedded in " UAParser.js ," a popular JavaScript NPM library with over 6 million weekly downloads, days after the NPM repository moved to get rid of three rogue packages that were found to mimic the same library. The supply-chain attack targeting the open-source library saw three different versions — 0.7.29, 0.8.0, 1.0.0 — that were published with malicious code on Thursday following a successful takeover of the maintainer's NPM account. "I believe someone was hijacking my NPM account and published some compromised packages (0.7.29, 0.8.0, 1.0.0) which will probably install malware," UAParser.js's developer Faisal Salman  said . The issue has been patched in versions 0.7.30, 0.8.1, and 1.0.1. The development comes days after DevSecOps firm Sonatype disclosed details of three packages —  okhsa, klow, and klown  — that masqueraded

Web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare last month fixed a critical vulnerability in its CDNJS library that's  used by 12.7% of all websites  on the internet. CDNJS is a free and open-source content delivery network (CDN) that serves about  4,041 JavaScript and CSS libraries , making it the  second most popular  CDN for JavaScript after Google Hosted Libraries. The weakness concerned an issue in the CDNJS library update server that could potentially allow an attacker to execute arbitrary commands, leading to a complete compromise. The vulnerability was discovered and reported by security researcher RyotaK on April 6, 2021. There is no evidence of in-the-wild attacks abusing this flaw. Specifically, the vulnerability works by publishing packages to Cloudflare's CDNJS using GitHub and npm, using it to trigger a  path traversal vulnerability , and ultimately trick the server into executing arbitrary code, thus achieving remote code execution. It's wor

An ongoing malvertising campaign tracked as "Tag Barnakle" has been behind the breach of more than 120 ad servers over the past year to sneakily inject code in an attempt to serve malicious advertisements that redirect users to rogue websites, thus exposing victims to scamware or malware. Unlike other operators who set about their task by infiltrating the ad-tech ecosystem using "convincing personas" to buy space on legitimate websites for running the malicious ads, Tag Barnakle is "able to bypass this initial hurdle completely by going straight for the jugular — mass compromise of ad serving infrastructure,"  said  Confiant security researcher Eliya Stein in a Monday write-up. The development follows a year after the Tag Barnakle actor was found to have  compromised nearly 60 ad servers  in April 2020, with the infections primarily targeting an open-source advertising server called Revive. The latest slew of attacks is no different, although the adve

Academics from Vrije University in Amsterdam and ETH Zurich have published a new research paper describing yet another variation of the Rowhammer attack. Dubbed  SMASH  (Synchronized MAny-Sided Hammering), the technique can be used to successfully trigger the attack from JavaScript on modern DDR4 RAM cards, notwithstanding extensive mitigations that have been put in place by manufacturers over the last seven years. "Despite their in-DRAM Target Row Refresh (TRR) mitigations, some of the most recent DDR4 modules are still vulnerable to many-sided Rowhammer bit flips," the researchers said.  "SMASH exploits high-level knowledge of cache replacement policies to generate optimal access patterns for eviction-based many-sided Rowhammer. To bypass the in-DRAM TRR mitigations, SMASH carefully schedules cache hits and misses to successfully trigger synchronized many-sided Rowhammer bit flips." By synchronizing memory requests with DRAM refresh commands, the researchers

Exactly a month after  patching  an actively exploited zero-day flaw in Chrome, Google today rolled out fixes for yet another zero-day vulnerability in the world's most popular web browser that it says is being abused in the wild. Chrome 89.0.4389.72, released by the search giant for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Tuesday, comes with a total of 47 security fixes, the most severe of which concerns an "object lifecycle issue in audio." Tracked as CVE-2021-21166, the security flaw is one of the two bugs reported last month by Alison Huffman of Microsoft Browser Vulnerability Research on February 11. A separate object lifecycle flaw, also identified in the audio component, was reported to Google on February 4, the same day the stable version of Chrome 88 became available. With no additional details, it's not immediately clear if the two security shortcomings are related. Google acknowledged that an exploit for the vulnerability exists in the wild but stopped short of s

In what's one of the most innovative hacking campaigns, cybercrime gangs are now hiding malicious code implants in the metadata of image files to covertly steal payment card information entered by visitors on the hacked websites. "We found skimming code hidden within the metadata of an image file (a form of steganography) and surreptitiously loaded by compromised online stores," Malwarebytes researchers said last week. "This scheme would not be complete without yet another interesting variation to exfiltrate stolen credit card data. Once again, criminals used the disguise of an image file to collect their loot." The evolving tactic of the operation, widely known as web skimming or a Magecart attack, comes as bad actors are finding different ways to inject JavaScript scripts, including misconfigured AWS S3 data storage buckets and exploiting content security policy to transmit data to a Google Analytics account under their control. Using Steganography

A cybersecurity researcher today disclosed technical details of multiple high severity vulnerabilities he discovered in WhatsApp, which, if exploited, could have allowed remote attackers to compromise the security of billions of users in different ways. When combined together, the reported issues could have even enabled hackers to remotely steal files from the Windows or Mac computer of a victim using the WhatsApp desktop app by merely sending a specially crafted message. Discovered by PerimeterX researcher Gal Weizman and tracked as CVE-2019-18426 , the flaws specifically resided in WhatsApp Web, a browser version of the world's most popular messaging application that also powers its Electron-based cross-platform apps for desktop operating systems. In a blog post published today, Weizman revealed that WhatsApp Web was vulnerable to a potentially dangerous open-redirect flaw that led to persistent cross-site scripting attacks, which could have been triggered by sending a s

In an effort to mitigate a large class of potential cross-site scripting issues in Firefox, Mozilla has blocked execution of all inline scripts and potentially dangerous eval-like functions for built-in "about: pages" that are the gateway to sensitive preferences, settings, and statics of the browser. Firefox browser has 45 such internal locally-hosted about pages , some of which are listed below that you might have noticed or used at some point: about:config — panel to modify Firefox preferences and critical settings. about:downloads — your recent downloads done within Firefox. about:memory — shows the memory usage of Firefox. about:newtab — the default new tab page. about:plugins — lists all your plugins as well as other useful information. about:privatebrowsing — open a new private window. about:networking — displays networking information. To be noted, these changes do not affect how websites from the Internet work on the Firefox browser, but going forwar

Are you using Komodo's Agama Wallet to store your KMD and BTC cryptocurrencies? Were your funds also unauthorisedly transferred overnight to a new address? If yes, don't worry, it's probably safe, and if you are lucky, you will get your funds back. Here's what exactly happened… Komodo, a cryptocurrency project and developer of Agama wallet, adopted a surprisingly unique way to protect its customers' funds. The company hacked its customers and unauthorisedly transferred nearly 8 million KMD and 96 Bitcoins from their cryptocurrency wallets to a new address owned by the company. Why? To secure funds of its customers from hackers. This may sound weird, but it's true. Komodo recently learned about a malicious open source, third-party JavaScript library that the company was using in its Agama Wallet app. The library, named "electron-native-notify," two months ago received a update from its anonymous author who included a secret backdoo

Shortly after Microsoft announced support for custom JavaScript functions in Excel, someone demonstrated what could possibly go wrong if this feature is abused for malicious purposes. As promised last year at Microsoft's Ignite 2017 conference, the company has now brought custom JavaScript functions to Excel to extend its capabilities for better work with data. Functions are written in JavaScript for Excel spreadsheets currently runs on various platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Excel Online, allowing developers to create their own powerful formulae. But we saw it coming: Security researcher Charles Dardaman leveraged this feature to show how easy it is to embed the infamous in-browser cryptocurrency mining script from CoinHive inside an MS Excel spreadsheet and run it in the background when opened. "In order to run Coinhive in Excel, I followed Microsoft's official documentation and just added my own function," Dardaman said . Here is an official doc

The world's popular torrent download website, The Pirate Bay , has again been in a new controversy—this time over secretly planting an in-browser cryptocurrency miner on its website that utilizes its visitors' CPU processing power in order to mine digital currencies. The Pirate Bay is the most popular and most visited file-sharing website predominantly used to share copyrighted material free of charge. The site has usually been in the news for copyright infringement by movie studios, music producers and software creators. The Pirate Bay has recently been caught generating revenue by secretly utilizing CPU power of its millions of visitors to mine a Bitcoin alternative called Monero without their knowledge. The modern Internet depends on advertising revenue to survive, which apparently sometimes spoils users' experience. But The Pirate Bay is trying to choose a different approach. Visitors to the Pirate Bay recently discovered a JavaScript-based cryptocurrency mine

Here's New Year's first Ransomware: Ransom32 . A new Ransomware-as-a-service, dubbed Ransom32 , has been spotted that for the first time uses a ransomware written in JavaScript to infect Mac, Windows as well as Linux machines. Ransom32 allows its operators to deploy the malware very quickly and easily. It has a dashboard that enables operators to designate their Bitcoin addresses to which the ransom can be sent. The dashboard also shows stats about how much Bitcoins they have made. In short, this new ransomware-as-a-service is so simple, and efficient at the same time, that anyone can download and distribute his/her own copy of the ransomware executable as long as he/she have a Bitcoin address. The copy of Ransom32 was first analysed by Emsisoft, which found that the new ransomware family, which embedded in a self-extracting WinRAR archive, is using the NW.js platform for infiltrating the victims' computers, and then holding their files by encrypting the

Open Source is the Future of the computer science world! On Wednesday, the popular coding website GitHub shared a graph that gives a closer look at the popularity of different programming languages used on its code sharing website that lets anyone edit, store, and collaborate on software code. Since its launch in 2008, GitHub saw various programming languages picking up momentum, as shown in the graph below. An insight into what GitHub is… GitHub is a web-based repository that operates on the functionality of a 'Git,' which is strictly a command-line tool. With 10 Million users as of today, the platform has become the primary source of housing open source software that is free of cost available to the world at large. A look at the picture of programming trends on GitHub over recent years is actually a look at how the computer world is evolving. Top 10 Programming Languages Here are the Top 10 Programming Languages on GitHub today: JavaS

Trusteer researcher Tanya Shafir   has recently identified an active configuration of TorRAT targeting Twitter users. Other than  spreading ideas on the most popular social networks, now cyber criminals are spreading  malware . The malware launches a Man-in-the-Browser (MitB) attack through the browser of infected PCs, gaining access to the victim's Twitter account to create malicious tweets.  Because the malware creates malicious tweets and sends them through a compromised account of a trusted person or organization being followed, the tweets seem to be genuine. Those tweets contain malicious links and they read : " Our new King William will earn even more than Beatrix. Check his salary" or "Beyonce falls during the Super Bowl concert, very funny!!!! " At this time the attack is targeting the Dutch market. The malware spreading via the online social networking service, used as a financial malware to gain access to user credentials and target their financial transactions. The a

Once again Google Security Team Shoot itself in the foot. Ansuman Samantaray , an Indian penetration tester discovered a small, but creative Security flaw in Google drive that poses phishing threat to million of Google users was ignored  by Google Security team by replying that," It is just a mare phishing attempt,not a bug in Google ". According to Ansuman , he reported a JavaScript Script Execution vulnerability in Google Drive Files on 20th December 2012 to Google Security Team and but Google rejected the report on 21st December. Ability to execute malicious script through Google drive files poses security threats, not just phishing attack, but an attacker able to extends the attack to malware spreading, etc. The flaw exist in the way Google Drive preview the documents in the browser. Online preview of the files executing code written in doc files as HTML/JavaScript just by changing the value of a parameter called " export " in the URL. ie.